When Game Developers Go Indie, Everybody Wins

“My goal is that people who work here love it here and talk about it,” says Klei Entertainment's Jamie Cheng.Photo courtesy Jamie Cheng

To the outside world, Jamie Cheng appeared to be working his dream job.

It was 2005, and Cheng was an AI programmer at Relic, a game design studio based in Vancouver, British Columbia, that had just been acquired by superpublisher THQ. Cheng had designed the artificial intelligence for strategy game Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, which had become a critical smash. Now he was working on a military action game called The Outfit, which — as one of the first Xbox 360 games — would be Relic’s first console title.

But Cheng just wasn’t feeling it. “The Outfit was definitely less fulfilling” than Warhammer, he says. “People didn’t believe in the game as much as I wanted to. I wanted to work on a product that people really believed in.”

In his spare time, Cheng was working on a small game called Eets, a colorful puzzle game with charming characters, and submitting it to the Independent Games Festival. He’d worked on some big-time games, but doing his own thing felt more creatively fulfilling, even if a million people had played against his AI routines in Warhammer.

Cheng was going to stick around until The Outfit launched, but when THQ delayed the game, he split. By July 2005, he’d founded his own game development company, Klei Entertainment, in a basement he was renting from a friend.

Five years later, Klei is 16 people working in a proper office in downtown Vancouver. Klei released its biggest game yet Tuesday: Shank, a gory hard-core action game that looks like a Saturday morning cartoon on steroids. Its fluid, fun gameplay and appealing visuals got it picked up by Electronic Arts. And at Klei, Cheng gets to make the games he imagines in his head, not the ones dictated by marketing weenies.

The stereotypical image of an indie gamemaker is an iconoclast who prizes art over commerce, or perhaps a kid with no formal training working in his parents’ house, cobbling together a genius new game idea using pirated software and raw talent.

But that’s not what the new crop of indies are. They’re veterans of the triple-A game biz with decades of experience behind them. They’ve worked for the biggest companies and had a hand in some of the industry’s biggest blockbusters. They could work on anything, but they’ve found creative fulfillment splitting off into a tiny crew and doing their own thing. They’re using everything they’ve learned working on big-budget epics and applying it to small, downloadable games.

The good news for gamers is that, as the industry’s top talents depart the big studios and go into business for themselves, players are being treated to a new class of indie game. They’re smaller and carry cheaper price tags, but they’re produced by industry veterans instead of thrown together by B teams and interns. Most importantly, unlike big-budget games that need to appeal to the lowest common denominator to turn a profit, these indie gems reveal the undiluted creative vision of their makers.

Gettin’ Shanked

“Five years ago was not a good time to start a studio up,” says Cheng.

It’s not that the economy was bad. No, starting up an indie game studio in the summer of 2005 was a major challenge because you couldn’t sell your games on consoles yet. Xbox 360 wouldn’t be available for months, and the notion of gamers logging in to Xbox Live to impulse-buy smaller, cheaper downloadable games might have sounded quite appealing but the market was totally unproven.

But as Klei grew, so did digital delivery of games. Before long, Xbox Live Arcade was breaking down the barriers of game distribution. Cheap downloads meant your game didn’t need to be made by a hundred people and have state-of-the-art tech to sell on a console anymore.

“A game like Shank would never have been made as a full retail game,” says Cheng. “We’re not hitting some lowest common denominator, we’re not trying to please everybody — we’re just trying to do what we’re passionate about.”

In Shank, you play a guy named Shank who loves to chop people up with knives, guns and chainsaws and gets that opportunity approximately once every five seconds. Cheng says being independent helped the designers really drill down and focus on what made the game important — they didn’t need to cram in two dozen different weapons just for the sake of an appealing bullet point on the back of the box, or to pad the game to make it 15 hours long.

“Our philosophy for Shank was all killer, no filler,” he says.

Chen’s passion for independent, author-driven games attracted more top talent who wanted to work on something smaller. Artist Jeffrey Agala had more than a decade of experience in the animation industry, working on Disney cartoons and directing episodes of Atomic Betty. Marianne Krawczyk, who won a BAFTA award for her work on Sony’s God of War, penned the game’s story.

And to top it all off, Klei scored a publishing deal with Electronic Arts’ Partners division, which usually handles games from big players like Valve and Harmonix.

It’s not just about the final product, Cheng says, it’s about the process. Working in a smaller group brings out the best in creative people, he says, because “you wear more hats, you get to do more things.”

“Everyone’s more involved,” he says. “When the company gets larger, there’s pressure to put people into boxes. That’s not fulfilling for people. That’s not how they’re going to eventually do their best.”

The best part of leaving the rat race of big-budget videogame development and creating an indie game with two friends has been spending more time with his new son, says artist Jake Kazdal.Photo courtesy Jake Kazdal

My Goofy Little Samurai Game

Two years ago, Jake Kazdal was hard at work drawing concept art for one of the biggest games that never was.

“I’ve never been accused of being overly intelligent when it comes to rash decisions,” Kazdal says. As a young man he moved to Japan, even though he barely knew the language. He became the only non-Japanese artist at Sega, where he helped create the eye-popping visual style of cult classics Rez and Space Channel 5. After four years at Sega, he moved back to the United States and eventually ended up at Electronic Arts’ Los Angeles design studio.

In 2005, Steven Spielberg had inked a deal with Electronic Arts to produce three games created around the film director’s visions. Of these, only one ever saw release — a Wii action game titled Boom Blox.

Meanwhile, Kazdal was part of the team creating a game code-named “LMNO,” which, unlike Boom Blox, was the sort of videogame you’d expect to come out of a partnership between Spielberg — a “quadruple-A big-budget sci-fi action-adventure summer blockbuster,” he says.

Kazdal got busy sketching out characters, locations and concepts of what the game’s first few levels would look like. But LMNO never got out of the preliminary stage: The decision was made to create only a vertical slice of the game, just using the designs for the first level.

“Instead of jumping forward into production, we decided to really stick with that one small area and really flesh out as much of the game’s mechanics and concepts as possible in that one little spot and not commit to making any other areas,” he said.

I needed to get that creative itch out of me.

Kazdal, “running out of stuff to do,” left the project and moved to the Command & Conquer 4 team. It turned out to be a good decision, because Electronic Arts soon scrapped LMNO and laid off the team.

Meanwhile, Kazdal had another major life change coming up: His wife was about to have a baby, and they didn’t want to live in expensive Santa Monica, California, on just one paycheck. So Kazdal took a job offer in Seattle, where his parents lived. Spending a lot of time at home hanging out with his newborn son, he started playing around with an iPhone development kit.

“I'm the director and the art director and the producer and the artist and the animator,” says Jake Kazdal of Skulls of the Shogun.Image courtesy Haunted Temple Studios

“I needed to get that creative itch out of me,” he says. The game he was creating would eventually be called Skulls of the Shogun, a 2-D strategy game starring armies of undead Japanese warriors. Kazdal called a friend, the senior AI programmer from LMNO, and they started working on it together.

“The two of us started this little goofy samurai game, just worked nights and weekends for a long time. I had no intention of quitting my job or anything — it was just a hobby, it was a lot of fun to play with when I was stuck at home with a newborn kid for a long time,” Kazdal says.

As the hobby project continued along, they switched over to Microsoft’s XNA development environment, allowing them to create the game for Xbox 360 and PC. A third former LMNO member joined them. “Pretty soon we were like, ‘Wow, we gotta go with this. This is too much fun,'” says Kazdal. “So we all quit our jobs and moved into it full time.”

The team secured angel funding for the new company, called Haunted Temple Studios. Some “big” publishing deals are on the table, so Skulls will probably benefit from serious backing when it is released next year. Kazdal works from his home in Seattle, videoconferencing most of the day with his co-designers in Los Angeles.

The best part, he says, is getting to spend time with his son. “I have lunch with him, I have dinner with him, I usually spend an hour a day just kind of hanging out with him,” he says. “If I’m tired I’ll literally go take a nap. If you’re at an office, you have to just suck down more coffee and suck it up.”

As tempting as the indie life might be, Kazdal brings up the catch: It wouldn’t be possible for three people to create a game of such high quality without spending decades in the trenches first.

“I definitely wouldn’t be in this situation if it wasn’t for the 10 or 15 years that I’ve been doing game design,” he says. “We’re all veterans at this point and we’ve learned the hard lessons of game development at the big companies. I wouldn’t say to you just coming out of college that you shouldn’t go get a job at a real studio.”

Still, just as Jamie Cheng found, Kazdal is a much happier artist when he’s in total control. “There’s no bleeding of the vision. It’s very discrete; it’s very distinct. I make all the executive decisions. When we want to try some crazy new gameplay mechanic, we just do it.”

“It’s the three of us moving forward, and it’s really strange and we love it.”

Hello Games' Joe Danger makes no secret of the classic games that inspired it.Image courtesy Hello Games

Everything Is Better With Lion-O

Sean Murray made his first computer game when he was 5. It was a text adventure modeled after games like Zork, and it was terrible.

“It was of that ilk where it’s like, ‘You’re in a room, there’s an exit to the north and the south. Which way do you go?’ And you would say, ‘Go north.’ And then it would say, ‘You’re dead. Maybe you should have gone south.'”

Still, he quickly became addicted after some friends tried out his early work. “That feeling of seeing someone playing your game was amazing,” Murray says. “That’s what it was always about for me.”

Murray made games throughout his childhood and soon landed a programming gig at Criterion, the Guildford, England, creator of the Burnout racing games.

“That was a dream job, that was a life ambition,” he says. “I was the biggest fanboy going around that studio.” Murray was technical lead on Burnout 3, and he and his friends were generally happy at Criterion. But something was missing.

“I had lost that thing that I had started out making games to do, which was that I never really got to see people playing games that I made. Burnout 3 sold millions but I’ve never actually seen somebody play it, which is really weird.”

Meanwhile, Murray had formed a core group of friends at Criterion, all gamemakers with a passion. “We just talked about games all the time, things that we’d done as kids or things that were really exciting to us. And it was almost implied that we were just going to go off and do something of our own.”

Making the decision to quit the rat race and set up shop was easy for the four founding members of Hello Games. But unlike Jamie Cheng and Jake Kazdal, who started their companies with a game prototype already up and running, Hello Games didn’t have a product.

If you want to do your own thing, you need to keep that alive.

They knew they wanted to make a game that felt like the old-school Nintendo and Sega games they’d grown up with. So they started an unusual brainstorming session.

“Our artist brought in this big box of toys that he had at his parents’ house, and we just sat and played with them,” Murray says. “We started mocking out game ideas. Except you’d have Optimus Prime in your hands, or Lion-O or whatever. Any game idea that you have is instantly made ten times better by having Lion-O in your hand.”

The toy that the team kept coming back to, though, was an Evel Knievel stunt cycle. “We just sat and played with it properly. We’d set up routes over books and dishes of water and fired it out of windows and down corridors and into other people’s offices. It was genuinely fun.”

The game that resulted was Joe Danger, a cartoonish game about pulling off crazier and crazier stunts with a motorbike on a variety of challenging linear courses. Hello Games self-published the game on PlayStation 3 in June, and it was a surprise critical smash. Game Informer magazine gave it the Game of the Month award over big-budget releases like Tiger Woods and Blur.

Murray and crew had to go through a lot to keep their creative vision together, though. “We went through a really difficult phase,” he says. “We took our game as it is now around to pretty much every publisher in the world and showed it to them, [but] we were unable to find somebody to publish the game.” Publishers, he said, either didn’t trust that the team of four could make a solid product — there wasn’t even a game designer on the team, just four programmers and an artist — or wanted to change the game from Hello’s original vision.

One night about a year ago, the team met at the pub with the intention of calling it quits. But alcohol-fueled confidence won the day, and they decided instead to double down and self-publish. To fund the rest of the development, Murray sold his house.

Hello Games was helped out by Sony’s Pub Fund,” which offers indie developers guaranteed royalties and marketing assistance in exchange for PlayStation 3 exclusivity. This gave the Hello Games team the support it needed — plus complete freedom — to make the game of its members’ dreams. Joe Danger earned its development cost back on the first day of sales.

“Indies will quite often paint a bad picture of working in the industry, or maybe that you’re tainted for doing it or whatever. For us, I got to work with some amazingly talented people at Criterion. That’s such a beneficial thing,” Murray says.

But Murray has some words of caution for those working on big-budget games.

“You get into this mentality that it takes 50 people to do anything. When people say, ‘Should I work in the industry first?,’ I say they should. But if you want to do your own thing, you need to keep that alive, because it can become very hard to break away.”

Here’s The Thing With Ad Blockers

We get it: Ads aren’t what you’re here for. But ads help us keep the lights on. So, add us to your ad blocker’s whitelist or pay $1 per week for an ad-free version of WIRED. Either way, you are supporting our journalism. We’d really appreciate it.